Daniel A. Bosh – 10/23/06

This page was last updated on October 23, 2006.

Nothing to brag about; Daniel A. Bosh; Beaver County Times; October 23, 2006.

If you’ve read Bosh letters over the years, you recognize him as a died-in-the-wool socialist. In the 2004 presidential campaign, Mr. Bosh was a Democrat national delegate committed to Dennis Kucinich. Mr. Bosh is a fulltime employee of the Steelworkers Pension Trust.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject letter.

“How fortunate for U.S. Rep. Melissa Hart to have taxpayer-paid employees like Angelo Terrana to write letters to the editor in defense of her miserable record in Congress (‘Hart has done a lot’, October 3.)”

[RWC] I guess elected officials are not supposed to defend themselves.

“The problem is that trying to dress up her performance is like putting earrings on a possum; it’s still not pretty.

“For instance, Terrana cites Hart’s support for the Bush Medicare prescription drug fiasco, which is a disaster. It is inadequate, leaving, 16 million older and disabled Americans on Medicare still without drug coverage. It is inefficient and wasteful, barring Medicare from negotiating prices for drugs, and requiring beneficiaries to buy insurance giving the insurance industry a cut and raising the cost unnecessarily. It is so costly that it alone has completely changed the cost projections for Medicare and endangers its future.”

[RWC] Note what Mr. Bosh is complaining about. The program doesn’t cover everyone for “free.”

Regarding “barring Medicare from negotiating prices for drugs,” a government program this large doesn’t negotiate. It sets the price it will pay and thus amounts to nothing more than coercion. To make up for the revenue lost to Medicare, those of us not on Medicare would have to pay higher prices.

“One feature has been a success. It was intended by Republicans to be a payback to big campaign donors in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. No surprise profits in the first half of 2006 for the top 10 pharmaceutical companies were more than $8 billion dollars higher than profits for the same period in 2005.”

[RWC] While most industry groups tend to favor Republicans because Republicans tend not to be anti-business, Mr. Bosh failed to note Democrats also get quite a bit of contributions from “insurance and pharmaceutical industries.” For the pharmaceutical industry, the breakdown is about 2/3’s to Republicans and 1/3 to Democrats. That’s about $26 million to Democrats since 2000. I couldn’t find a breakdown just for the health insurance industry, but the breakdown for the insurance industry as a whole is about the same as for pharmaceuticals.

Finally, you’ll note Mr. Bosh didn’t – couldn’t? – tell us why we should vote for Ms. Hart’s opponent. To date, no Hart- and/or Santorum-bashing letters have told us why we should vote for their opponents.